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September 1st, 2016 I’ve been back in Vermont for two weeks now. At the end of the day, this place comes and will always come closer to home than anywhere else I might live. It’s in my blood, familiar as the back of my hand.

The aesthetics of Vermont are winning me over again, as they always do. It’s a sort of resting, this–to stare into the distance and see nothing but woods and clouds and perhaps a single mown field on the horizon. You can hardly do that in Germany. It’s a country full of green spaces, but with 82 million people in a land the size of Montana, the next village is almost always in sight. Here, so much of what one sees is defined by emptiness, and that emptiness is breathtaking.

This time, instead of posting my own photos I am handing things over to my very talented mother and sister, who have captured a great deal of beauty on the farm in the last two years. Most of the pictures were taken from our front porch.

February 28, 2016 Yesterday, the sun shone in Germany–really shone, with a strength and warmth that have been absent for months. And when the sun shines in Germany in the winter, you leave the libraries at the university behind and you get out and you do something.

So we packed a picnic lunch and tea and tools into the back of a rattly rainbow Volkswagen and drove into the Weinbergen (vineyards; literally “wine mountains,” which I think is much more poetic). In the late winter the vintners begin the process of pruning the grape vines in preparation for the next growing season, and I was lucky enough to be invited by one particular vine-pruner to tag along.

And it was marvelous.

The vineyards of the Rheingau are almost ridiculously steep, falling straight down to the banks of the river. The slopes are covered in slippery silver-blue or red slate. Standing upright requires strong legs and a good sense of balance; actually doing something at any level of efficiency while standing upright requires genuine skill.

In these vineyards, the steepness means that all of the work is still done by hand, using techniques that have been in place for centuries. Pruners now use battery-powered clippers, but the process is still the same: cutting away old or unwanted growth from each plant and training selected shoots to grow in the proper directions. It all sounds simple enough, but is in fact anything but–every plant is a decision, a tiny work of art, shaped and re-shaped over a period of decades by dozens of hands.

Stone steps are built into the walls to access lower terraces.

And so we worked. Or rather, J. pruned like a professional while I took pictures, did not fall off any walls, tried not to cut off the wrong things, and generally enjoyed myself more than I have in a long time.

Hands down the most excellent vine-pruner in the Rheingau.

Different types of slate.

Battery-powered clippers.

Yes, that’s me cutting grape vines in a flannel shirt from Vermont in a vineyard on the Rhine. With thousand-year-old-castle ruins in the background. Sometimes it is possible to get the miraculousness of existence into a photograph.

I think the rest of the pictures speak for themselves. Even from the most distant of perspectives, the Rheingau in late February, perched on the dividing line between winter and spring, is pretty dang gorgeous.

At the end of the day, we hiked up to the very top of the ridge. Tired legs, chapped hands, lunch long forgotten. But the sun was slowly falling towards the mountains on the other side of Rhine and we didn’t want to go.

I’ve never been one for meditation in any traditional form. But this, I thought, sitting on a bench and looking at the mountains and not being alone, this comes pretty close.

A gazebo at the very top of the mountain, with a self-service shelf of wine and glasses for hikers.

January 17th, 2016 Sometimes, you find yourself dancing in some dive bar in the Neustadt at four in the morning. And then sometimes you look out the window to find that it is snowing, really snowing, for the first time since last winter, and the entire world is delighted. You run to the window and laugh, and everyone runs to the window and laughs, and someone opens the door and white fat flakes blow on to the dance floor. You step into the street, and they melt on hot skin. Even the DJ is euphoric.

And then you wake up the next morning after three hours of sleep and take your camera and run out into the cold because this is something.

And then you skip back to your warm apartment to sleep off your hangover, and the air is full of church bells and the cafés full of Sunday-brunchers, and you are very much content.

Locus Amoenus, Latin: the lovely or pleasing place. A common trope in Ancient Roman literature, usually a garden or woodland–a spot of inherent safety, comfort, and striking beauty. The concept features in works by authors as early as Homer, and it was reveled in by the later pastoral poets before being passed on to the writers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Locus amoenus is a place to retreat to, often with overtones of Elysium on earth.

December 7, 2015 I’ve always had a very strong connection to home. Even as a small child, I had an intense awareness of what constituted my people, my land, my place: this is where I came from and where I may leave, but also to where I will always return. Then, as now, I was drawn as much to the physicality of home as to the people who make it up–to the space of it all, to the anatomy and physique. How do we define our most intimate places physically, with what do we choose to surround ourselves? What, anatomically speaking, separates a roof over my head from my home?

For the longest time, home to me was the farmhouse in Vermont I grew up in, and I reveled in the place’s form and build and being just as much as I reveled in its people. There was the iron daybed on the porch where I plowed through Thomas Mann and Nabokov and Nietzsche, sweating even in the shade through the hottest July afternoons. Or the room I shared with my sister–the “Bohemian Garret,” we called it–with patchwork quilts on the beds and silk scarves pinned up to hide the leak in the roof. Or the wood stove downstairs, snow slanting like sand against the window in January, where I lay on a sheep rug next to the cats and scorched the back of my flannel nightgown.

All that to me was home, and when I left for far-away college at age 18 I wasn’t really looking to find it any place else. Sure, my roommate and I etched out our spaces in campus housing, hanging posters and trying to keep our plants alive, but it was never really came close to what I had in Vermont. And I didn’t need it to. I knew my father would arrive in his beater car every spring to load boxes and take me back.

My window in the American college dorm–almost home, but not quite.

Now, though, things are changing. I want home, am longing for it, actually, but this longing isn’t accompanied by the desire to return to Vermont. Instead, for the first time in my life I want to create, want to see if I–right here, right now, alone in this country that is in the end still foreign–can make a physical space with as much meaning and pull as the Vermont farmhouse.

The desire started, I suppose, when I first saw the apartment I have been renting now for almost a year. As soon as climbed the blue spiral staircase and ducked through the door behind the realtor, it was my space–the Garret again, but infinitely more Bohemian, 120 square feet of slanty ceilings and exposed beams, windows looking out into leaves and down onto cobblestones. And a tiny tiled bathtub behind a red-checked curtain. If I ever get a lover, that would be just big enough for the both of us, I thought, and somehow that sealed the deal.

“This is it.” I told the realtor. “This is my Carl Spitzweg painting, my La Bohème, my Dachkammer!! I can read German literature here!” Overly ecstatic, as always. “I’ve already had five offers this morning, but I will see what I can do,” he said, and walked me back to the bus stop in the rain. And then, of course, he called the next day: “Frau Goodling, I had to pull a damn lot of strings, but the place is yours, because I can see you living there.”

Tea on the tiny blue balcony.

And now, almost a year later, when I get off the crowded bus and turn into the cobblestoned street where I live, nearly empty at 8pm on a week night, there is coming to be the same lifting-of-weight, the same recognition and expansion I felt in the passenger seat of my father’s beater car, turning off the highway in New York into the green mountains of Vermont. The feeling that I am returning to my space, my home.

I still can’t quite place what it is, physically, that makes a dwelling place into a home. But I think I am uncovering it slowly.

Yesterday, for instance, I bought a Christmas tree for the first time in my life, because Christmas trees have always belonged to the anatomy of home in my world. It’s amazing how the presence of a tiny tree can turn a room into more than just a lived-in space.

Also, in the mean time, I may or may not have found out that my bathtub is indeed big enough for two, with candles around the edge and the skylight open above our heads.

I think someone up there likes me.

And so I move slowly towards an uncovering of the anatomy of home, on my own this time, an ocean apart from all other known-ness. Is this a fundamental part of adulthood, this drive to make home where you are, with your own imagination and paycheck, to make a place speak to you and call you back at the end of the day?

Or does my desire to create home arise from the distance itself, from the physical vastness separating me from the spaces of Vermont? At the end of the day, for all my love of Germany and for all the reveling in land and language I have done in the last year, I am still abroad, living in a land that is not really my own. Perhaps the creation of home is a coping mechanism of sorts, a way to make sense of and process an expanse.

My street.

In the end, with my Christmas tree and my bathtub and a pot of tea on the stove and basil plants on the counter and expressionistic art on the walls, I am left with an awareness of the incredible privilege of it all, this creating and having of a home.

Because Germany is filled right now with hundreds of thousands of people who have no home, who have had their physical spaces destroyed or made inhabitable. The architecture of home became the architecture of nightmare, and so they left everything and came here, and they are starting over in spaces that, however desperately needed, are everything other than home.

And I, sitting on my own bed with a glass of wine and Bocelli crooning in the background, have never had to do that. I left my home because I wanted to, because I was driven by passion and beauty and the desire to pursue my own education. I am going about creating a home in Germany because I can, because it is something lovely. It is as simple as that.

Which all makes me overwhelmingly thankful to be here. There is no terror behind my actions, and that is a miraculous thing.

And, I admit, maybe I’m a little proud of what my space is turning into, too. So the next time you are in a particular street in Mainz, Germany, stop by and I will give you a tour and serve you tea in my home.

“If one wanted to travel to somewhere incomparable, to a fantastic mutation of normal reality, where did one go? The answer was obvious. What was he doing here? He had gone completely astray. That was where he wanted to travel.”

San Marco.

October 20, 2015 It’s been over a week since I have been back from Venice, and I still don’t know quite how to write about it. The weirdest, loveliest, most contradictory place I have ever been in, yes–but what does that even mean? Venice is the most improbable (unwahrscheinlichste) of all cities, Thomas Mann says.

The trip was the third in my series of Mann pilgrimages (Munich and Lübeck down, Davos still to go!), another working-out of this strange drive to live art that seems to dominate a good deal of my existence. In this case, the work behind it all was Death in Venice, the novella from 1911 that was my introduction to the author. Aging writer Gustav von Aschenbach travels to Venice, falls in love with a beautiful child, and destroys himself: Thomas Mann’s perfect irony played out against a heady backdrop of Nietzsche and Wagner and Plato and, of course, the city itself.

The flag of Venice.

“Can there be anyone who has not had to overcome a fleeting sense of dread, a secret shudder of uneasiness, on stepping for the first time or after a long interval of years into a Venetian gondola? How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin….”

“‘The signore wants to go to the Lido.’ ‘But not with you!’ ‘I row you well.’ True enough, thought Aschenbach, true enough, you will row me well. Even if you are after my cash and dispatch me to the house of Hades with a blow of your oar from behind, you will have rowed me well.”

Winged lions at the Doge’s palace.

My first impression of Venice was one of beauty, pure and simple. I had the uncanny feeling of walking through a painting, all day, every day, through some stirring landscape of teal-blue water and delicate bridges and white marble facades fading into the morning haze. But it wasn’t unproblematic: in Venice, there is no escape from the aesthetically lovely, and it all therefore becomes incredibly exhausting. In Germany, there is always an escape–you can leave the Old City behind after a few blocks and find yourself surrounded by Aldis and 1950s apartment complexes. You can’t do that in Venice, however, and the constant in-your-face presence of so much gorgeousness is somehow wearing. Human beings aren’t meant for paradise.

And at the same time, too, Venice’s beauty is always backed by the Absurd. The gondolas are packed with baseball-cap-wearing Americans and selfie-stick-wielding Japanese. You can buy knock-off plastic carnival masks and knock-off Gucci bags and knock-off everything else on every street corner for five euros. Loveliness is exploited for money, illegally, and when the police walk by all the hawkers leap up at once from whatever square you are on and run, scattering fake Gucci bags behind them.

Even the aesthetic of the city itself, in the end, is flawed on closer examination: the lagoon stinks, even in October, and the marble facades are streaked with pigeon shit and crumbling into the water. The whole place is sinking.

“Well, I shall stay, thought Aschenbach. What better place could I find? And with his hands folded in his lap, he let his eyes wander in the wide expanse of the sea, let his gaze glide away, dissolve and die in the monotonous haze of this desolate emptiness.”

The Grand Canal.

“Never had he known the joy of language more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in the Word…”

But I fell in love anyway. Mit Erstaunen bemerkte Aschenbach, dass der Knabe vollkommen schön war. With astonishment, Aschenbach saw that the boy was perfectly beautiful: Where else in the world could that astounding sentence, which I am convinced is one of the most important in all of art, have been written? The breaking-in of beauty and Eros in Aschenbach’s life had to happen in Venice; it’s the only city unwahrscheinlich enough to sustain that level of passion.

And at the same time, Venice IS Mann’s definition of artistic creation, of art itself: beauty and transcendence backed by the suspect, by something just slightly nauseating and improper. Being in the city was like seeing Death in Venice, and maybe the entirety of Thomas Mann’s opus, from the inside out.

“He fled from the crowded commercial thoroughfares, over bridges, into poor quarters. There he was besieged by beggars, and the sickening stench from the canals made it difficult to breath. In a silent square, one of those places in the depths of Venice that seem to have been forgotten and put under a spell, he rested on the edge of a fountain, wiped the sweat from his forehead and realized that he would have to leave.”

Goldmund and I couldn’t decide if the water was blue or green, or both, or neither.

“It is well that the world knows only the beautiful work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources of an artist’s inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them…When Aschenbach put away his work and left the beach, he felt worn out, even broken, and his conscience seemed to be reproaching him as if after some kind of debauchery.”

And so I walked the city for hours at a time, without a map, entirely lost, in some sort of Mann- and Venice-induced half-stupor. The place was full of tourists even at the very end of the season, but it was shockingly easy to get away from it all: to take two turns off the beaten path and find oneself entirely alone next to some shady canal, with some black gondola gliding by. They really are silent, as Thomas Mann writes.

On the third day we went to the Lido, the island next to Venice where Death in Venice takes place, and lay on the beach in the sun and looked at the waves and were extraordinarily happy. Even there, though, the atmosphere around us was strange, melancholy somehow: long empty stretches of sand, bathing houses already battened down for the winter, only a few stragglers in the water. We were nearly the only guests at the sea-side café, where we split a pizza and put on our coats and scarves after the sun went down.

Above, live music in the cafes at San Marco. Below, the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido, where Thomas Mann stayed in 1911, fell in love with with the 11-year-old Polish Baron Adzio Moes, and began writing Death in Venice on hotel stationary.

“The lulling rhythm of this existence had already cast its spell on him; he had been quickly enchanted by the indulgent softness and splendor of this way of life. What a place this was indeed, combining the charms of a cultivated sea-side resort in the south with the familiar ever-ready proximity of the strange and wonderful city.”

On the last afternoon in Venice, which I spent alone, I ducked into a store off of some tiny side-street and found myself surrounded by lace and paper mache and hanging dark brocade: a carnival shop, a real one this time, no plastic here. A young man around my age sat at a work table painting filigree onto a row of masks. Diamond stud in one ear, dark hair, paint-stained apron. I saw the piece I wanted to buy as soon as I walked in: the half-mask of Commedia dell’arte‘s Columbine with the Phantom’s hand over one eye, two figures in one, the coming-together of male and female and dark and light. “Did you make this one, too?” I asked the young man at the table after I had made my purchase. “No,” he said, “that was my father. Do you want to know the story behind it?” And so he spent the next thirty minutes talking to me about making art and living in Venice, pulling down masks from the wall to show me the different techniques, talking about the Commedia and carnival revelries and showing me his tiny boat parked in the canal outside.

“There is nothing for a young man in Venice–nothing for me here,” he said as I was collecting my things to go. “The entire city is for the tourists. If I want to go out or dance I have to go to the mainland and take a taxi. It is very hard to live here; in the past 25 years three-quarters of the population have left.” “Why don’t you leave, then, too?” I asked. “Because I am Venice,” he said, and then a gondola-load of tourists came into the shop, and I took my purchase and got on the vaporetto back to the apartment and Goldmund, and was very much content.

“A sacred, deranged world, full of Panic life, enclosed the enchanted watcher, and his heart dreamed tender tales. Sometimes, as the sun was sinking behind Venice, he would sit on a bench in the hotel park to watch Tadzio, dressed in white with a colorful sash, at play on the rolled gravel tennis court; and in his mind’s eye he was watching Hyacinthus, doomed to perish because two gods loved him.”

“For Beauty, dear Phaedrus, only Beauty is at one and the same time divinely desirable and visible: it is, mark well, the only form of the spiritual that we can receive with our senses and endure with our senses. For what would become of us if other divine things, if Reason and Virtue and Truth were to appear to us sensuously? Should we not perish in a conflagration of love, as once upon a time Semele did before Zeus?”

“He sank down on one of the seats, deliriously breathing the nocturnal fragrance of the flowers and trees. And leaning back, his arms hanging down, overwhelmed, trembling, shuddering all over, he whispered the standing formula of the heart’s desire–impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous and sacred nevertheless, still worth of honor even here: ‘I love you!'”

October 14, 2015 Ever since having been introduced to Richard Wilbur’s superb Love Calls Us to the Things of This World in a Sunday School class over a decade ago, I have been searching for a place like the one described in the poem. Who knew I would have to travel to Giudecca, a tiny island in the Mediterranean off the coast of Venice, to find it?

Yoga under a sea stack on Fårö Island. As far north as I’ve ever been in my life.

September 24, 2015 One final post on Gotland–I’ve written about the people and the farms, but nothing about the natural landscape itself, which is, after all, the backdrop to and shaper of everything that goes on on the Island.

Gotland makes Mainz seem tame and domesticated, civilized to the point of complete docility. In Germany, the pre-Christian, pre-modern past is hidden behind layers of growth and technology and gorgeous Baroque cathedrals. You can almost fool yourself into thinking it never existed–that Germany has always been this post-Enlightenment land driven by progress and the Church. On Gotland, however, it all feels very close–the Vikings, the wooden ships, Odin and Valhalla and all the rest. Portrayals of Mary are more similar to Freia than to anything Christian. On Fårö, the tiny island to the north of Gotland, farmers still raise their livestock in thatched barns and behind stone walls.

One of the 92 (!!) nearly-identical churches still in weekly use on the island. Nearly all were built between the 11th and 12th centuries–Romanesque or Gothic architecture, sometimes with a defense tower in front.

Cathedral ruins in Visby. Many catholic churches on the island were abandoned after the Reformation.

The museum in Visby had a fascinating collection of engraved stones, both pre- and post-Christianity. Here, a woman holds a snake as part of a pagan ritual.

Christian and pagan imagery combine.

Boats outside of a small fishing village.

Fishing huts with stakes driven into the ground for drying the nets.

Thatched barn and windmill on Fårö Island.

Another fishing village on Fårö, only accessible by a winding track along the edge of the ocean. The rental car took a bit of a beating, there.

White limestone beaches.

The northernmost point of Fårö is lined with Sea Stacks, limestone towers formed over millennia by wind and water.

Lilla Karlsö Island off the eastern coast of Gotland, where one farmer we talked to grazes several hundred sheep. There were dozens of white swans swimming in the Baltic along this stretch of the coast.

August 21, 2015 Usually, I try to accompany my photographs with some sort of narrative. I’m interested in telling stories, after all, and words are the means to that end. Sometimes, however, the pictures just speak for themselves.

The courthouse on the town square, with the flags of Bavaria, Kulmbach, and Germany.

August 20, 2015 Before we head to Bayreuth, Katie and I are farm-sitting for friends in Kulmbach–sprawling stone farmhouse, beautiful views, pigs and gardens and physical labor and evenings in front of the fire. For me, it is a chance to get out of my head: I cook in the huge kitchen for hours every day, stack wood for the fire. There’s not much space to overthink things.

Today, we took a break from the work to spend a few hours downtown, along with the two other young ladies who are watching the farm with us.

Kulmbach, like almost every other tiny Dorf in northern Bavaria, is beautiful–not in a touristy, expensive way, but with the sort of effortless charm that reminds me of the villages in Vermont. We drank cappuccinos and then hiked up to the castle outside of town, in the rain, wearing wool sweaters. Autumn is almost here.

The inner courtyard of the Plassenburg, the local castle.

We all stopped a the café for coffee and ice-cream, thanks to a generous tipp from the young farmer who bought two piglets from us yesterday.

The clock-tower at the Lutheran church.

On the other side of the camera, for once. Thanks, Katie.

Kulmbacher Bier. Kulmbach, village that it is, is renowned across Germany for its breweries.